


young folks

by youaremarvelous



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe, Day drinking, M/M, Mutual Pining, like...late 50s to early 60s, old people meet cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 03:59:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16569215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youaremarvelous/pseuds/youaremarvelous
Summary: After thirty years of living in California, working as a travel agent to drum up business for his family’s onsen, Yuuri finds himself out of the job, completely alone, and surviving his day to day life, rather than ever really living it. It’s not the right time to find love, but he might not have a say in the matter.





	young folks

**Author's Note:**

> my piece for the [yoi lit mag](https://yoilitmag.tumblr.com/)
> 
> theme: time

Yuuri squints at the hours of operation sign peeling off the one-way mirror door of his nearby neighborhood bar. The late August sun peers over his shoulder—a judgmental interloper—scrawling the fine lines around his eyes and mouth in deep wells of inky shadow and sticking his shirt to his back with sweat.

 

He wipes his forehead with his arm, checks the time on his phone. 11:34. The bar has barely opened. The thought of being labeled a pathetic Tuesday morning drunk burns the back of Yuuri’s neck like a branding iron, but his shame seesaws with a surge of heart-squeezing anxiety. He pushes his way inside before reason has time to settle, the specter of Yuuko’s inevitable disappointment trailing hot on his heels.  

 

She corralled him into her apartment only a few days earlier.

 

“We need to talk.”

 

“Uh oh.” Yuuri lowers himself onto the triplet’s old stepping stool, one of the few remaining furniture pieces not wrapped up in bubble wrap and piled Tetris-tight into Yuuko and Takeshi’s station wagon. “Are you breaking up with me?”

 

Yuuko lobs a balled up real estate ad at his head. “Be serious.”

 

“You better listen to her,” Takeshi warns from the kitchen. He’s facing away from them at the stove—hip cocked to one side, stirring the curry for tonight’s dinner. “She’s been in planning mode for months trying to figure out how to mother you from Japan.”

 

Yuuri rubs his sweaty palms on his thighs. He’s dizzy from the smell of spices, the heat of the apartment crowding in on all sides. He picks up a business card from the pile of past graduation programs and long-expired warranties Yuuko’s sorting, runs his finger across the gold embossed lettering. ‘ _Onsen Travel Services_ ,’ a relic of his former life.

 

“You should be worrying about how to keep up with the girls.”

 

“The girls call me every day,” Yuuko says. She tucks a newspaper-wrapped framed nursing certificate into the box at her foot and settles back into her chair, tucks a loose strand of silver-threaded hair behind her ear. “You’ve lived next door since we were kids and you won’t even respond to a text.”

 

“It’s hard for me to read the screen.”

 

“You read off a screen all day.”

 

“That’s not reading, that’s...” Yuuri pushes a hand up under his glasses, presses his fingers into his eyelid. “So...socializing?”

 

“Arguing with strangers over the delivery date of their shower beer caddies isn’t socializing.”

 

“But arguing with you about this is?”

 

“This isn’t an argument,” Yuuko clarifies with a finality that exemplifies her thirty-odd years raising three headstrong future lawyers. “It’s a discussion. When’s the last time you left your apartment?”

 

“Yesterday.”

 

“For something other than groceries.”

 

Yuuri feels a trickle of sweat drip down his spine. He stares at a phone number scrawled on the back of the business card, a Rorschach blot of ultramarine where the ink has bled out from sweat or maybe tears.

 

“I’m not trying to criticize.” Yuuko leans forward to touch his knee. “I know it’s been a hard year. I just...I don’t want you to end up one of those old men who die in their apartment without anyone knowing.”

 

Yuuri flinches.

 

“Which is why...” Yuuko waits patiently, lets her intentions hang until Yuuri lifts his eyes to meet hers. “I set up a date for you.”

 

The words settle into Yuuri’s brain one by one. Separate, at first, ‘ _date, what about the date, how can she set up anything when she’s leaving tomorrow morning_ ?’ Then all at once—a disorienting deluge. “You... _what_?” Yuuri asks when he’s recovered enough to speak.

 

Takeshi whistles low from the kitchen.

 

“He’s from my seniors’ yoga class. He’s nice. And handsome. You’ll like him.”

 

Yuuri clenches the business card in his hand. The sharp cardstock edges crease his palm. “You’ve got to cancel it.”

 

“It’s not that serious,” Yuuko insists. “You can go to the park, maybe the aquarium…”

 

“What if he’s a murderer?” Takeshi offers wryly.   

 

“Right, one of those yoga-loving serial killers they’re always talking about in the news.” Yuuko bats off the suggestion with a wave of her hand. “He dresses his dog in sweaters. He’s completely harmless.”

 

“What if he doesn’t like me?” Yuuri’s lungs cave in, his breathing stilted and uncomfortable. “I’m...it’s been years. What do you even wear on a date?”

 

“You look fine in what you have on,” Yuuko says. Yuuri looks down at his tattered sweatpants in disbelief. “Takeshi, tell him he looks good.”

 

Takeshi sets two bowls of rice on the table, the third nestled in the crook of his arm. “You’re sexy and you know it.”

 

Yuuri doesn’t know it. He clenches his fingers into his greying temples on the morning of the ‘date’—a Tuesday because Yuuri had hoped the odd hour would dissuade his mystery suitor from showing. He paces the length of his living room like an animal in a cage, his thunderous heartbeat shaking his hands, pushing into his throat.

 

Yuuri has spent the past year bleeding out his days in a stagnant cycle of meaningless work and sleep, but now he feels the pulse of every second ticking in the back of his mind like a countdown—the overwhelming need to move.

 

He’ll go on a quick walk, he decides, to get some air, clear his head. It isn’t until he’s a mile down the road, pushing his way out of the overbearing heat into the damp, air-conditioned cold of a nearby bar that reality descends.

 

There’s another patron inside. Yuuri sits two stools over from him, staring hard into the depressing depths of his third early afternoon screwdriver. He wants not to care, but he keeps catching pieces of him in his periphery. The pink cuff of his rolled sleeve, the length of his thigh straining the seams of his slate grey slacks.

 

Yuuri glances over for a better look, to complete the Picassian puzzle of Eastern European cheekbones and manicured fingers poised around a half-empty vodka tonic. He’s met with clear blue eyes—beauty that’s only sharpened by the influence of time pushing against his hairline, wrinkling his forehead like a silk sheet.

 

“The loneliest men in town, right?” The man lifts his drink, toasts the open air with a wink. “You can sit closer, you know. No need to be a stranger.”

 

Yuuri would normally turn away, pretend not to have heard, but he’s been staring. Still is. A rare breeze plays at his back. He stands because it feels less awkward than the alternative.

 

“There we go,” the man says when Yuuri settles in next to him.

 

Yuuri swallows a mouthful of his drink. The vodka loosens the words from his throat. “I don’t normally do this.”

 

“Do what?” The man asks with a lax smile.

 

“Come here,” Yuuri clarifies. “Drink before twelve.”

 

The man raises his eyebrows, his smile curves down almost imperceptibly before righting itself again. “Should we leave then?”

 

Yuuri chokes into his screwdriver.

 

The man laughs, eyes creasing at the corners. He holds out a napkin. “A joke, though I’d love to have company picking up my dog from the groomer’s.”

 

Yuuri wipes his chin on the proffered napkin.

 

“Viktor, by the way.”

 

Something about his accent sparks a ghost of a memory. Yuuri squints. “Do I...know you?”

 

The man, Viktor, watches him appraisingly.

 

“I do. You…I planned a honeymoon to Japan for you and your fiancé. Um...Yuuri Katsuki, from Onsen Travel Services?”

 

“Yuuri,” Viktor repeats, the sharp lines of his face softening. “I remember. Didn’t go through with the marriage, I’m afraid, but the trip was wonderful.”

 

Yuuri rolls his lips together, embarrassed to have dredged up what must be a painful memory. “Sorry to hear that. I mean about the marriage. Not the—not the trip.”

 

“Men,” Viktor says dismissively, as though that’s explanation enough. “You quit your modeling job for them, move halfway across the world, and they screw their personal trainer a week before the wedding.”

 

“You’ve gotten further than I have, at least.” Yuuri follows Viktor’s lead, peels back his defenses in a fit of alcohol-soaked reckless honesty. “Japan, America…” he watches a bead of condensation trail down his glass with a self-deprecating smile. “Turns out my lack of appeal is a worldwide phenomenon.”

 

Viktor leans closer, he smells like velvety musk—cologne that’s probably worth a fourth of Yuuri’s rent. “Men are stupid,” he declares. “They clearly don’t know what they’re missing.”

 

Yuuri chances a glance at him. From this angle, he can see through Viktor’s eyes—liquid pools of concentrated light—observing him back. Something coils tight in Yuuri’s stomach, something he believed to have died out with the successive loss of his business and precious dog—his resultant mistrust in the alleged benevolence of time: promising love, but only ever taking it away.

 

Attraction.

 

Lust.

 

The ultimate improbability.

 

Yuuri curls his toes in his sneakers. A familiar pang of anxiety infiltrates his cushy buzz, warning him to move, to leave. Now.

 

“I should probably go.”

 

“Oh—” Viktor sits back. “I’m sorry if I—”

 

“No,” Yuuri shakes his head, waves the bartender down to pay. “It’s not you, it’s...I have to get back to work.”

 

“Sure,” Viktor nods, stirring his drink with a cocktail straw. “Hey, Yuuri,” he calls when Yuuri pockets his wallet and heads for the door. Yuuri pauses, one foot inside the building, one out, the oppressive summer heat burning his back through his shirt. “There’s a senior’s yoga class at the park on Friday. 7 pm. I’d love to see you there.”

 

Yuuri doesn’t nod so much as visibly startle, the possibility of Viktor wanting to see him again as inconceivable as his own newly-sparked libido. “Maybe,” Yuuri says. He doesn’t wait for a response, escaping to the sidewalk, back to the safety of his apartment and the predictability of half-scripted online customer service.

 

The truth of Viktor’s identity doesn’t sink in until later that night when he’s chatting back and forth with a woman out of Oregon over the whereabouts of her tourmaline healing crystals.

 

The dog. The yoga.

 

He covers his eyes with his hand, swallows down the bitter aftertaste of alcohol coating his mouth. Of course Viktor isn’t really interested. Of course he’s putting on an act as a favor for a friend.

 

Yuuri pulls out his phone. “You were right,” he types to Yuuko. “He’s nice.” He lays his phone face down on his desk, then picks it up again, re-opens his messages after a moment’s consideration. “And handsome.”  

 

+

 

Yuuri doesn’t go to Friday yoga. Partially because his awkward social encounters quota has been fully satisfied for the week, and partially because the musty-smelling yoga pants he dug out from the back of his pajama drawer stretch tight over his round hips and dig into his stomach like a doughy pastry.

 

A week goes by, two weeks, and aside from craning his neck whenever he passes by the neighborhood bar, glancing through the dark windows for a peek of silver hair, skin so pale you can see the circulation of blood like a blue-lined subway map, Yuuri’s life unfolds as usual. That is to say, slowly—dragging by in empty intervals of eat, sleep, work. Fooling himself that apathy is an adequate substitute for happiness.

 

By the time September blows in from the Pacific—tepid and no less stifling—Yuuri can hardly remember what his own voice sounds like for the irregularity with which he’s used it. He walks home from the drugstore one night, arms weighed down with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Oreos—junk foods he’s never managed to quit even when he outgrew his youthful ability to easily digest them.

 

The street is quiet, interrupted by the occasional distant siren, the crooning of mockingbirds like sneakers against polished wood. Then, suddenly, it’s not.

 

Yuuri barely catches the warning of, “Makkachin! No, bad girl,” before an unwieldy weight collides with his chest, tilting his balance into his heels and sprawling him backward into the grassy median. There’s a snuffling noise in his ear, a warm, wet _something_ rooting around in his collar, leaving a damp trail across his cheek.

 

“Yuuri!” A human-shaped blur races towards him. Yuuri’s brain is still too addled to question why it knows his name. “Are you okay?”  

 

“Fine,” Yuuri says before he’s really sure. He pats around in the grass for his glasses—thrown from his face in the tumult—and pushes them back on his nose when he finds them blessedly unbroken. The world sharpens back into recognizable forms: a white-muzzled brown poodle, rummaging around his bag of convenient store goodies, and Viktor, running after her, a conspicuously dogless leash dangling from his hand.

 

“She’s always slipping her collar,” Viktor explains, kneeling at Yuuri’s side. He refastens the lead around his dog’s neck and pulls her away from the busted bag of groceries, then turns back to Yuuri, covers his mouth with his hand. “You’re bleeding!”

 

Yuuri stares down at himself, blinking.

 

Viktor takes him gently by the wrist, turns his arm over to reveal a quarter-sized graze on his elbow.    

 

“Oh, this is noth—”

 

“My place is a couple blocks down,” Viktor cuts him off, helping Yuuri to his feet. “Let me get you patched up—” he nods at the neon orange Cheetos viscera strewn across the ground—“and pay you back for those.”

 

Yuuri starts to politely decline, but Makkachin touches her nose to his palm, a cool breeze rustles the white alders lining the street like a picket fence, and any arguments melt from his tongue. Angry anxiety klaxons and pervasive insecurities aside, being in someone’s company after weeks of self-imposed isolation is nice. For the first time in a while, Yuuri chooses to live in the moment, an active victim to the universe’s relentless current.

 

“Fourteen years of scolding and she still tries to eat everything she’s not supposed to,” Viktor says when they reach his home.

 

“That makes two of us,” Yuuri says.

 

Viktor laughs, the bright sound of it fizzing in Yuuri’s chest.

 

Viktor unlocks the door, lets Makkachin in, and Yuuri looks up, takes in the house’s wood-slatted facade. It’s sunset-pink in the orange glow of the electric street lights, an Indian paintbrush-blossom in a monotonous strip of grey and white.  

 

Viktor gestures for Yuuri to enter ahead of him. “I know I’ve got a first aid kit in here somewhere,” he says, cutting across the living room with the straight-backed authority of a person who isn’t afraid to impose their presence on the world.

 

Yuuri hovers awkwardly in the center of the room—shoulders sagging—a gym shorts-wearing oaf in a carefully-curated forest of color-coordinated books and spruce-framed Hockney prints.

 

“Sit,” Viktor instructs from the kitchen, not unkindly.    

 

Yuuri finds a wooden-legged, stone-blue leather sofa and lowers himself into it. He sits hunched over his thighs, hands entwined in his lap, attention bouncing off potted plants and rumpled fashion magazines while Viktor rummages through cabinets.

 

His eyes settle on a familiar burlap sachet of perfumed Epsom salt leaning against the side table lamp. Yuuri reaches for it without thinking, holds it to his nose. The nostalgic smell of lavender and sandalwood coats the back of his throat.

 

“Smells nice, right?” Viktor asks, startling Yuuri from his thoughts. He settles on the couch next to Yuuri, a spray bottle of antiseptic in his hand. “I got it at an onsen during the ‘no honey honeymoon.’ You know it, right? Yutopia?”

 

“In Hasetsu—” Yuuri rubs his thumb over the blue stamped “y” on the side of the bag. “I usually send people there when they visit Japan. Or...did, anyway.”

 

“Did?”

 

“The travel agency went out of business around a year ago. The Internet…”

 

Viktor grimaces in understanding. “Millennials.”

 

Yuuri’s lungs collapse around a breathy laugh. “It’s my fault for not keeping up with the times.”

 

“I know what you mean. I finally got bullied into making an Instagram account. Apparently, Facebook is for old people now. This might sting,” Viktor warns. He drapes Yuuri’s arm across his thigh, elbow abrasion out. His fingers are cold despite the heat of the room.

 

Yuuri crosses one leg over the other, pointedly ignores the shift of Viktor’s muscles below his arm. “It’s fine, anyway. My work now’s not so bad,” he says, more to convince himself than anything.

 

Viktor squirts a dose of antiseptic on Yuuri’s elbow. “Really?”

 

“Doing online customer service for a nationwide online retailer? No, it’s awful.”

 

Viktor snorts. Yuuri imagines the sound might be ugly if it came from anyone else.

 

“People just...have no inhibitions when they’re online. I had to reimburse a customer for a late delivery this afternoon. It was for a personal massager. She was in a _hurricane zone_.”

 

Viktor laughs, a hand over his mouth, Adam’s apple bobbing, and Yuuri’s chest flushes with goosebumps.

 

“If it’s any consolation, I’d let you plan another trip for me,” Viktor says once he’s recovered.

 

Yuuri turns his eyes to his knees, hopes his gnawing on his bottom lip can be misconstrued as pain. “Thanks.”

 

“I mean it. I need to visit Japan again. I wasn’t exactly in the right headspace the first time.”

 

Yuuri swallows wordlessly, watches Viktor dab his scrape with a cotton swab—palms as narrow as a trowel, fingers long and nimble.

 

“I boarded the plane out of spite more than anything. Nearing sixty years and I still haven’t figured out a better method of dealing with my feelings than outrunning them.”

 

It’s a startlingly honest admission. Yuuri pinches the scratchy fabric of the handmade sachet between his thumb and forefinger. “My family owns Yutopia.”

 

“I had an inkling.”

 

“Really?” Yuuri looks up at Viktor. He’s peeling the back off a Band-Aid.

 

“I met the nicest woman running the place. Looked a lot like you. She tried to set me up with her son, a handsome travel agent out of California.”

 

Yuuri groans and covers his face with his hands. “I’m so sorry.”

 

“Don’t be.” Viktor peels open another Band-Aid, sticks it on Yuuri’s hand under his knuckles. “Your mother is wonderful. She had me wipe my tears and fed me my weight in katsudon.” Viktor peels off another Band-Aid, sticks it to Yuuri’s wrist. “And she called me ‘Vicchan!’”

 

Yuuri touches the Band-Aid. It’s powder blue and patterned with cartoon poodle faces. “That sounds like her.”

 

“I’ve been thinking about going back for years now. Is she—”

 

“Still trying to set me up with patrons? Probably.”

 

“Good.” Viktor rifles in the box for another Band-Aid. “I mean...good that she’s well.”

 

He pulls out a bandage. Yuuri’s mouth tilts into a smile. He holds up his hand—Band-Aid out—and wiggles his fingers. “I think I’m thoroughly patched.”

 

Viktor sticks one last Band-Aid on Yuuri’s cheek. His fingers linger for what can’t be more than a few seconds but feels infinitely longer. The moment bends, stretches, rinses away the vestiges of Yuuri’s apprehension and replaces it with mineral spring heat, the azalea red sunrise lapping up the shore. Briefly, Viktor’s eyes meet Yuuri’s. An enticing smile. “If you say so.”

 

Viktor leaves to stow away the first aid kit and Yuuri unsticks his thighs from the couch, his teeth from his dry mouth. He leans the perfumed sachet back against the table lamp, restores the shrine to Viktor’s reckless impulsivity masquerading as a benign souvenir.

 

There’s no reason for Yuuri to loiter, but the inevitable goodbye hitches behind his tonsils. The air conditioner shuts off, steeping the room in frothy silence, and Yuuri turns his wrist over, eyes blurring over the bridge of blue cutting across his pulse. It occurs to him suddenly, rattling in his feet like an earthquake.

 

He doesn’t want to go.

 

He reaches a hand towards Viktor—instinctively—like he would his mother’s purse strap when he was five and terrified of losing her in a crowd.

 

Makkachin’s nails click across the smoky hardwood and Yuuri breaks from his trance, draws his hand back before Viktor can see, palms damp with relief. The dog mosies her way towards him from a dark hallway, drops a tattered, multi-colored knotted rope on the floor between them.

 

“Here to apologize, hm?” Viktor reenters the room, hands on his hips, casually reprimanding. “No one can ever claim I didn’t teach her manners.”

 

Yuuri smiles, reaches down to pet her. He scratches under her ears, her chin, loses his fingers in her cottony curls. Makkachin wags her tail, the heavy weight of it thumping against the floor like shoes in a washing machine, fanning Yuuri’s ankles with drafts of cool air.

 

“She likes you,” Viktor says. He watches Yuuri run his hand down Makkachin’s back from shoulder to flank.

 

“The feeling’s mutual.”

 

Viktor leans his weight against the archway, white hair fanned over one eye, a finger poised over his lips. A marble sculpture drowned in amber phosphor. “They say dogs can divine a person’s true character, you know?”

 

Yuuri glances up at Viktor’s face, eyebrows raised to his hairline.

 

“They can tell us things if we really listen,” Viktor continues. “Like now.” He cups his hand to his ear, leans towards Makkachin’s panting mouth. “What’s that girl? Oh, is that right? You want me to take Yuuri on a date as an apology?”

 

Viktor cuts his gaze to Yuuri, eyes as transparent blue as the swell of a wave before it crests, and Yuuri startles, stands so quickly his head spins. “Oh, no, that’s—it’s fine, you’ve done enough.”

 

Viktor looks from Makkachin to Yuuri. “She doesn’t speak human.”

 

“I meant _you_ , you’ve done enough. I don’t date. I haven’t. Not in—” Yuuri tries to quickly count on his fingers, gives up after ten—“forever?”  

 

“So why not break the streak? With me, if you don’t mind. Interspecies relationships are generally frowned upon.”

 

Yuuri opens his mouth to argue, then closes it again. Open, close. Open, close. Like a gasping fish.

 

“Unless you’re one of those...what’s the word, fluffies?”

 

“What?” Yuuri yells. He clasps a hand over his mouth, the pitchy exclamation rattling like a screen door caught in the wind. “I’m not—I’m…”

 

“Great!” Viktor draws his phone from his back pocket. “To each their own, of course, but that’s a relief. Do you mind if I get your number so we can coordinate?”

 

Yuuri stares, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He wants this, he thinks—has wanted it since he first moved to California thirty years ago. Someone whose smile pushes his heart into his throat, whose touch infuses his skin with sweetness. Someone whose presence warms him like the Yutopia hot springs.  

 

But it was never the right time. He had work. He had weight to lose. The dating scene was too new, too scary.

 

Love was supposed to be a gift for patience, but sometimes Yuuri wondered how much longer he’d be forced to wait.

 

“For Makkachin,” Viktor encourages. “Just look at her.” And Yuuri does: her tilting head, her white muzzle, her dusty rose collar that matches Viktor’s shirt. “How can you say no to that face?”

 

+

 

As it happens, reversing decades of ingrained anxiety-driven avoidance isn’t as easy as exchanging phone numbers. Yuuri understands this on an intellectual level, but it doesn’t stop him from lying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, replaying Viktor’s voicemails on a tortuous mental loop.

 

“ _Hi, Yuuri, Viktor here. So I’ve been looking at restaurants, how do you feel about pho? There’s a new place on Overland. Or maybe noodles aren’t a great choice for a first date. But you know what they say about rules...anyway, give me a call when you get this!_ ”

 

“ _Yuuri, me again. Thinking a restaurant date isn’t a great choice. It’s cliché, right? I know you’re not a fan of yoga, but my gym is hosting a collaboration with a local shelter. Puppy classes! Just thought it could be fun. We could go for a drink after? Let me know! Viktor, by the way!_ ”

 

“ _Still waiting on your call, Yuuri. Busy with work these days? They’re showing Dirty Dancing in the park this weekend. If you’re free, we should go._ ”

 

“ _Yuuri, it’s— I said no! No cabernet for doggies!_ ”

 

“ _Have you ever been to Deer Creek Beach?_ ”

 

“ _Sorry, call dropped. It reminds me of Hasetsu. Hope you’re well._ ”

 

The grocery store grows littered with pumpkin spice flavored goods, paper ghosts festoon apartment windows, and Yuuri isn’t surprised when the calls stop coming. He cries about it, anyway, his head propped on his knees while he helps a guy in Kentucky file a return on a Darth Vader cookie jar.

 

The solitude is stifling. His window is open but the stagnant air settles over his apartment, thick and heavy as a blanket. He remembers Yuuko’s words so many months ago: “I don’t want you to end up one of those old men who die in their apartment without anyone knowing.”

 

It had seemed dramatic at the time, but now the reality of it stares him down, sifting through his fingers like sand in an hourglass. He’s alone, and he might not ever possess the courage not to be.

 

Yuuri pulls out his phone with trembling fingers, burns a signal flare in the form of a two-word text.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

He doesn’t expect a reply, but one comes a few hours later when he’s staring into his open fridge, pretending to process dinner options.

 

“I owe you a bag of Cheetos. Mind if I drop by?”

 

Yuuri types out his address, slaps the phone face down on the kitchen table when he finally presses send. His shirt is ripped at the armpit, stained with yesterday’s curry, but he’s too wound up to change. This isn’t about seduction, he tells himself, pulse knocking against his teeth. This is about holding himself accountable to Viktor, to the ineludible tide dragging his thoughts to Viktor’s feelings, Viktor’s opinion of him, Viktor’s fingers, lamb’s ear-soft against his cheek.       

 

By the time Yuuri hears the knock at his door his limbs are rattled loose, jangling with each wobbly step like a pocket of loose change. Tears burn his eyes when he swings the door open.

 

Stares.

 

Blinks.

 

The man in front of him is tall. He has oyster grey hair and square shoulders, a broad nose, and a scar over his eyebrow.

 

He is not Viktor.

 

“Yuuri?” The stranger asks, forehead pleated—apprehensive. “You’re Yuuri, right? Sorry to drop by unannounced. I just...wanted to apologize for standing you up a couple months back. I know Yuuko was counting on me to…” He swallows, folds his lips together. “Well, anyway, I wanted to see if you’d like to get dinner maybe? Start fresh?”

Yuuri’s heart stutters against his ribs. His brain simmers with white static.

 

Questions swirl through his mind. A murky whirlpool, capsizing the multitude of projected scenarios Yuuri had panicked over in the time he’d spent pacing his apartment, waiting for Viktor’s arrival.

 

Why is this stranger here?

 

Why is he apologizing?   

 

If this man is Yuuko’s blind date, then who is Viktor?

 

Before he has the chance to excavate anything intelligible from the lexiconical mire, the metal clang of the stairwell door fractures the silence. Yuuri jerks his head towards the source—desperate for a distraction—and finds Viktor frozen in the hallway, a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in one hand, a single pink flower in the other.

 

It’s hard to tell from Yuuri’s location—sandwiched between his apartment and the strange man in his entryway—but Yuuri swears their eyes meet. A flash of recognition, a dawning realization, before Viktor steps back, turns around, disappears down the hallway from where he came.

 

Yuuri sees him leave and a thought blooms from the corners of his crowded brain. A puny seed of thought germinating in the fragile light of clarity. Love isn’t a symptom of time. It’s the tortuous crawling of days spent pining, brief touches immortalized by memory—brushed into hair, stirred into coffee—mornings that stretch into decades, lying in bed together, losing the ability to notice the change in each other from the first year of dating to the tenth. Love moves with time—enriches it—and it doesn’t happen by waiting.

 

“Sorry,” Yuuri tells the stranger, slipping under his arm, pulling the apartment door closed behind him. “There’s no time.”

 

It’s romantic comedy cliché, but Yuuri runs—poorly, because he hasn’t worked out since his joints started aching in his forties and gave him a reasonable excuse not to. Yuuri charges down the steps two at a time, adrenaline flushing out the pain in his knees.

 

“Viktor,” he pants, slipping his hand around the crook of Viktor’s arm when he reaches him on the sidewalk. “That wasn’t what it looked like!”

 

Viktor stops. Thankfully, because Yuuri is already out of breath, sweat dripping from his forehead, beading the sidewalk at his feet like drops of rain. “It’s okay,” Viktor says, voice like mist. “I’m not offended. I already know you’re not interested. I just didn’t want to interrupt.”

 

Yuuri releases Viktor’s arm, takes a step back, struggling to process the last few minutes, the last few decades. “I should’ve called you back. I’m sorry, I’m—” Yuuri grips his hands in his hair. “I’m really bad at this.”

 

“A returned call would’ve been nice,” Viktor concedes, bordered in by a humorless laugh. “But y’know, that ship sailed a while ago. I’m used to the rejection by now.”

 

Yuuri shakes his head, mute with uncertainty.

 

“Loneliest men in town?” Viktor prompts.

 

Yuuri looks at the flower stem snapped between Viktor’s fingers, then back at Viktor’s face, eyes creased with confusion. “I don’t...”

 

Viktor yanks his phone from his pocket, scrolls rapidly through a feed of dog photos and selfies, eyes awash in the ambient blue glow. “Here we go, June 1st,” he says, turning the screen to Yuuri.

 

“You spilled a whiskey ginger on my shirt and offered me yours. We made out in the bathroom. I wrote my number on your business card. Any of this ringing a bell?”

 

Yuuri gawks at Viktor’s phone, at a man who looks like him but shirtless and rosy-cheeked, a tie around his head, standing on top of the bar, singing into an empty beer bottle. Memories bob through his mind in disjointed tableaus.

 

Crying in the parking lot after finally relinquishing the key to his office of thirty years. Ducking into the neighborhood bar on the way home, desperate for mental anesthetic in the form of middle-shelf alcohol. Pounding shot after shot, and waking up the next morning on Yuuko and Takeshi’s couch, shirtless and hungover, a collection of poppy red hickeys decorating his neck like a spring bouquet.

 

Yuuri bends at the waist, slides his hands under his glasses and pushes the heels of his palms into his eyes. He scours his mind for an appropriate response, manages to scrape a singular word from his lungs.

 

“Shit.”

 

Viktor watches the crown of his head, looks at his phone again before repocketing it. “Wait”—he pauses, processing—“this...isn’t an act, is it? You seriously forgot?”

 

“It’s not an act,” Yuuri groans into his palms. “I’m a horrible drunk. I climbed onto a roof naked once.”

 

“Wish I could’ve seen that.”

 

Yuuri groans louder.

 

“So, hold on,” Viktor says. “You’re telling me I’ve been spending my retirement staking out a bar for a guy who’s the Jekyll and Hyde of drunk casanovas?”

 

“I’m so sorry,” Yuuri wails.

 

“And the man upstairs?”

 

“My friend set us up. I’ve never met him before. I don’t even know his name.”

 

Viktor laughs. It’s quiet at first, breathless with disbelief, then louder, skipping across the sidewalk like a stone across water. Yuuri laughs, too, a giddy amalgamation of bewilderment and relief and pure, boundless joy bubbling up from his stomach.

 

“So, where do we go from here?” Viktor asks once he’s caught his breath.

 

Yuuri isn’t sure if it’s the refreshing breeze turning the leaves on the sidewalk, stroking Yuuri’s neck like Viktor’s perpetually cold hand, but he knows his answer.

 

He grips a hand in Viktor’s shirt, pulls him down so their lips meet. The kiss is chaste, precariously balanced between Viktor’s surprise and Yuuri’s sober hesitance. Then Viktor closes his eyes, opens his mouth, and it’s deeper, warmer. Long—the length of each second carving out Yuuri’s memory with the taste of Viktor’s lips, his tongue—and simultaneously too short.    

 

When they finally part, a few seconds, an eternity, later, Viktor is swollen-lipped, cheeks as pink as a cherry blossom petal. He is uncharacteristically disheveled and, Yuuri thinks, unbelievably beautiful.

 

Viktor’s hand is on Yuuri’s hip. Yuuri can feel his fingertips trembling there, cautiously optimistic like a minute hand on the edge of the hour. “Can I take that to mean we’re dating?”

 

Yuuri meets his eyes, warm blue, outlined with a history of gentle smiles and unquestionable grief. A history Yuuri wants to know, to study, to marry with his own.

 

“Well,” Yuuri says, leaning in for another kiss, “we’re not getting any younger.”

**Author's Note:**

> [[tumblr](http://youremarvelous.tumblr.com/)] [[twitter](https://twitter.com/marvyarts)]


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